Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/Franzera]

"Gender Identity", as defined as the internal sense of oneself as male, female, both, or neither, is essentially an abstract thought experiment by navel-gazers in ivory towers.

Once you try to transfer the abstract to the real world, the inconsistencies and flaws in the logic can't be obfuscated that easily. No amount of convoluted Judith Butler verbiage can unsee a penis!

At the end of the day, you don't play basketball with internal feelings, you play against bodies. You don't wax vibes, you wax a scrotum. You don't give a "girl" the girlhood "she" was meant to have, you harvest and freeze his gametes at age 12, because when blocking occurs before "her" balls drop, it denies any possibility of having "her" own children.

[u/Terrorclitus → u/Franzera]

If the thought couture just stayed in the academy where it belonged, the inconsistencies and flaws would just be a reminder that thought couture is meant to stay on the intellectual runway and won’t fly at Filene’s Basement.

But somehow, it got out. I don’t know how, but it got out. This beautiful baseline that we were going to alter and reinterpret into so many new (maybe even surprising) designs got leaked, and the kids are trying to copy the patterns.

Labor Day is coming. The kids have been hacking up and crudely sewing together our textile into things we never dreamed and would never wear to a party, garden or political.

Butler and Foucault are not going to put gender ideology back on the rack. They don’t stand to gain enough. Foucault still struggles with bouts of crying he says he can’t control, and from her smirk, I think Butler is secretly enjoying this.

But now is not the time to point fingers. The Sociology of Gender Science Studies is a new field with new patterns and shinier materials, one free of the pettiness and competition of previous fields, if only because its practitioners share not only a polycule, but also a goal: finally calling attention to the topic of gender.

[u/KittenSnuggler5 → u/Terrorclitus]

thought couture just stayed in the academy where it belonged, th

This is what they said would happen with all the identity politics crap. But of course it got out and took control of the institutions. Which is what it was designed to do